iTunes: Still Slowing Down Windows PCs After All These Years

colinneagle sends this quote from an article at NetworkWorld: "I run a very nifty desktop utility called Rainmeter on my PC that I heartily recommend to anyone who wants to keep an eye on their system. One of its main features is it has skins that can monitor your system activity. Thanks to my numerous meters, I see all CPU, disk, memory and network activity in real time. the C: drive meter. It is a circle split down the middle, with the right half lighting up to indicate a read and the left half lighting up for write activity. The C: drive was flashing a fair amount of activity considering I had nothing loaded save Outlook and Word, plus a few background apps. At the time, I didn't have a Rainmeter skin that lists the top processes by CPU and memory. So instead, I went into the Task Manager, and under Performance selected the Resource Monitor. Under the Processes tab, the culprit showed its face immediately: AppleMobileDeviceService.exe. It was consuming a ridiculous amount of threads and CPU cycles. The only way to turn it off is to go into Windows Services and turn off the service. There's just one problem. I use an iPhone. I can't disable it. But doing so for a little while dropped the CPU meters to nothing. So I now have more motivation to migrate to a new phone beyond just having one with a larger screen. This problem has been known for years. AppleMobileDeviceService.exe has been in iTunes since version 7.3. People complained on the Apple boards more than two years ago that it was consuming up to 50% of CPU cycles, and thus far it's as bad as it always has been. Mind you, Mac users aren't complaining. Just Windows users."

Comments

Complete disaster

[thoughtspace]

First world problem.

Re:why does your phone need software running on yo

[Charliemopps]

It's fucking terrible software. Clearly written by someone that has no idea how Windows works. When you plug in the apple device (iPhone, iPod) windows trys to read the drive on the device. Unfortunately Apples DRM is basically to encrypt the entire drive. So windows wants to format it. To prevent windows trying to do this constantly (and if it's a family member you have to because they will eventually click yes and fuck the device until you restore it) you need to disable windows ability to check the drive. This has the unintended consequence of making it not read any other device either. So now when you plug in a camera or USB stick, it doesn't open the device or the dialog that simplifies migrating the date into your computer.

If that weren't bad enough, you can't view the files on the device without iTunes. You cannot copy over MP3s like you can with any other device on he market. They must be packaged up, encrypted and then synced to the device by iTunes. But you do not "sync" the devices. iTunes just does it for you. If you've not disabled the windows auto-detection like I mentioned above, the sync will sit for about 20min and then fail. And it will do this over and over. Once you have it and working, it will sync when you log in. But again, if you have lots of songs, it takes it 20min to do this sync. So you add 1 new song to the list that you just bought, but it needs to wait until that first sync completes, then starts over with your 1 new file. Instead of adding 1 new file to the device, iTunes instead re-encodes the encrypted file and passes the entire thing to the device. Every time you sync you are deleted the entire contents of it and re-writing. It's completely insane. I literally got a clone of my wifes $200 ipod online for $20... the only real difference was when you plugged it in, it opened like a USB stick and you dropped songs in. Done... my wife is much happier. Die iTunes, Die.